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James Caverlee

19 accepted papers

2026

Curriculum Reinforcement Learning from Easy to Hard Tasks Improves LLM Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

We aim to improve the reasoning capabilities of language models via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Recent RLVR post-trained models like DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated reasoning abilities on mathematical and coding tasks. However, prior studies suggest that using RLVR alone to…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

How to train data-efficient LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, \ie, techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with da…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learnability-Informed Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

We aim to improve the reasoning capabilities of diffusion language models (DLMs). While SFT performs well for autoregressive models, its use in DLMs faces challenges. Our observation and analysis reveal that vanilla SFT does not consider learnability, i.e., what and when tokens are learned. Specific…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Survey on LLMs for Story Generation

EMNLP 2025

Methods for story generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) have come into the spotlight recently. We create a novel taxonomy of LLMs for story generation consisting of two major paradigms: (i) independent story generation by an LLM, and (ii) author-assistance for story generation – a collaborati

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DisastIR: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark for Disaster Management

EMNLP 2025

Effective disaster management requires timely access to accurate and contextually relevant information. Existing Information Retrieval (IR) benchmarks, however, focus primarily on general or specialized domains, such as medicine or finance, neglecting the unique linguistic complexity and diverse inf

2025

GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used, but they often generate subtle factual errors, especially in long-form text. These errors are fatal in some specialized domains such as medicine. Existing fact-checking with grounding documents methods face two main challenges: (1) they struggle to under…

2025

Learning Disentangled Equivariant Representation for Explicitly Controllable 3D Molecule Generation

AAAI 2025technical

We consider the conditional generation of 3D drug-like molecules with explicit control over molecular properties such as drug-like properties (e.g., Quantitative Estimate of Druglikeness or Synthetic Accessibility score) and effectively binding to specific protein sites. To tackle this problem, we…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ReasoningRec: Bridging Personalized Recommendations and Human-Interpretable Explanations through LLM Reasoning

NAACL 2025findings

This paper presents ReasoningRec, a reasoning-based recommendation framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge the gap between recommendations and human-interpretable explanations. In contrast to conventional recommendation systems that rely on implicit user-item interactions, Re…

2024

DA3: A Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack against Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Language models can be manipulated by adversarial attacks, which introduce subtle perturbations to input data. While recent attack methods can achieve a relatively high attack success rate (ASR), we’ve observed that the generated adversarial examples have a different data distribution compared with…

2024

DACL: Disfluency Augmented Curriculum Learning for Fluent Text Generation

COLING 2024main

Voice-driven software systems are in abundance. However, language models that power these systems are traditionally trained on fluent, written text corpora. Hence there can be a misalignment between the inherent disfluency of transcribed spoken content and the fluency of the written training data. F…

2024

FANTAstic SEquences and Where to Find Them: Faithful and Efficient API Call Generation through State-tracked Constrained Decoding and Reranking

EMNLP 2024finding

API call generation is the cornerstone of large language models’ tool-using ability that provides access to the larger world. However, existing supervised and in-context learning approaches suffer from high training costs, poor data efficiency, and generated API calls that can be unfaithful to the A…

2024

Quantifying the Impact of Disfluency on Spoken Content Summarization

COLING 2024main

Spoken content is abundant – including podcasts, meeting transcripts, and TikTok-like short videos. And yet, many important tasks like summarization are often designed for written content rather than the looser, noiser, and more disfluent style of spoken content. Hence, we aim in this paper to quant…

2024

Taylor Unswift: Secured Weight Release for Large Language Models via Taylor Expansion

EMNLP 2024main

Ensuring the security of released large language models (LLMs) poses a significant dilemma, as existing mechanisms either compromise ownership rights or raise data privacy concerns. To address this dilemma, we introduce TaylorMLP to protect the ownership of released LLMs and prevent their abuse. Spe…

2024

The Neglected Tails in Vision-Language Models

CVPR 2024poster

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in zero-shot recognition but their performance varies greatly across different visual concepts. For example although CLIP achieves impressive accuracy on ImageNet (60-80%) its performance drops below 10% for more than ten concepts like night snake presumably due t…

Cited by 44SourcePDFScholar
2023

Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance

EMNLP 2023long main

Objectivity is a goal for Wikipedia and many news sites, as well as a guiding principle of many large language models. Indeed, several methods have recently been developed for automatic subjective bias neutralization. These methods, however, typically rely on parallel text for training (i.e. a biase…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Co$^2$PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pre-trained Language Models are widely used in many important real-world applications. However, recent studies show that these models can encode social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biases in downstream applications. To address this challenge, we propose Co$^2$PT, an effici…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

PromptAttack: Probing Dialogue State Trackers with Adversarial Prompts

ACL 2023findings

A key component of modern conversational systems is the Dialogue State Tracker (or DST), which models a user’s goals and needs. Toward building more robust and reliable DSTs, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. T…

2023

Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model

EMNLP 2023long findings

Question generation is a widely used data augmentation approach with extensive applications, and extracting qualified candidate answers from context passages is a critical step for most question generation systems. However, existing methods for candidate answer extraction are reliant on linguistic r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Meta Propagation Networks for Graph Few-shot Semi-supervised Learning

AAAI 2022technical

Inspired by the extensive success of deep learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proposed to learn expressive node representations and demonstrated promising performance in various graph learning tasks. However, existing endeavors predominately focus on the conventional semi-supervised set…